any different
people oppose some or all aspects of Darwin's thinking, or the views
that have arisen since and go by the term "Darwinism". This
essay distinguishes and names the major varieties of
anti-Darwinism. It does not attempt to defend or reject any views,
just to provide a map to the conceptual territory.

Caution to the Reader

Every one of these viewpoints, although it has a name and
often a number of defenders, is only a notional position, and
is not held by anyone as bluntly as stated here. People can and
do hold a variety of these positions and see no conflict with
each other or Darwinism. Just because someone flies a banner
doesn't mean there's an army underneath it or a war to fight. The
world of science is not a formal logical system, and schools
of thought do not resolve most of the time into exclusive camps.
Or to put it another way, borders on maps are often arbitrary.

Introduction

If you wish to disagree with Darwin, it is important to know what
aspect of Darwin's thinking, and more importantly of modern
evolutionary theory, you are disputing. Many opponents of Darwinism
seem to think that because one disagrees with, say, the role of
natural selection in evolution, that one automatically disagrees with
the idea of evolution itself. Creationists especially seem to slide
from "disagrees with some aspect of synthetic Darwinism" to
"rejects evolution". One of the more dishonest versions of
this tactic lies in the use of comments made in one context (for
example, Colin Patterson's talk on the relevance of cladistic methods
to reconstruct evolutionary trees in the Symposia on Systematics at
the American Museum of Natural History) in an entirely different
context (the supposed rejection by Patterson of Darwinism in total,
despite his having written a book on evolution accepting Darwinian
theory [1], see Patterson
Misquoted: A Tale of Two 'Cites'FAQ).

What Darwinism actually is, is of course at issue. It is a
term that has many different meanings, depending on the field
in which it is being discussed [2].
In, say, artificial
life research, Darwinism tends to mean natural selection (in
the form of what are called "genetic algorithms"). In
systematics
it means the reconstruction of ancestral forms and historical
sequences of species. In bacteriological research it means the
evolution of drug-resistant strains by selection. In organismic
biology it means the evolution of new forms of life. In genetics
it means the so-called "central
dogma" of the inability of information about the state
of the body to be reverse transcribed back into the genes, because
that view was first proposed by an arch-Darwinian, August Weismann,
in the 1880s. And in fact, all of these are just tendencies that
vary according to where the researchers are, who you are reading,
and the period in which those people lived. "Darwinism"
according to Wallace in 1890 [3]
is very different to Darwinism according to Stephen Jay Gould
or Richard Dawkins.

So, to overcome this confusion of meanings and to ensure that
both notional Darwinians and anti-Darwinians alike know what it
is they accept and what they object to, this essay covers the
varieties of anti-Darwinism, including opposition to transmutationism,
common descent, undirected variation, randomness, selection, Weismannism,
and monism.

1. Transmutationism - that species change form to become
other species; the alternative view is Statism

2. Common descent - that similar species have common
ancestors; the alternative is a view I can only call Parallel
descent (a view held by Lamarck)

3. Struggle for existence - that more are born than
can survive; the alternate view is sometimes called Commensualism

4. Natural selection - that the relatively better adapted
have more offspring, sometimes called Malthusianism; the
alternate has no name.

5. Sexual selection - that the more "attractive"
organisms of sexual species mate more (and have more offspring),
causing unfit traits to spread; again there is no alternate,
just a denial that it happens

6. Biogeographic distribution - that species occur
close by related species, explaining the distributions of various
genera; this view, first published by Wallace, is in opposition
to the older "single centre of creation" notion.

7. Heredity -

a. Darwin's own theory was called "pangenesis"
and is no longer accepted (it was a form of what we now call
"neo-Lamarckism", or the inheritance of aquired
characters),

b. Weismannism - the more modern view that genes don't
record information about the life of organisms.

To this I must add four other more recent theories:

8. Random mutation - the notion that changes in genes
aren't directed towards "better" alternatives; in other
words, that mutations are blind to the needs imposed by the ecology
in which organisms find themselves

9. Genetic drift/neutralism - the view that some changes
in genes are due to chance or the so-called "sampling error"
of small populations of organisms. Molecular neutralism is the
view that the very structure of genes changes in purely random
ways.

and

10. Functionalism - the view that features of organisms
are neither due to or are constrained by the shapes (morphology)
of their lineage, but are due to their functional, or adaptive,
benefits.

Darwinism, in common with several other sciences dealing with
historical change, also is sometimes held to assert -

11. Gradualism - the view that changes do not occur
all at once, and that there are intermediate steps from an earlier
stage to the next.

Anti-Darwinisms

Each of these "Darwinian" theories can be, and have
been at some time in the past 150 years, challenged, and the end
result called "anti-Darwinian". Anti-Darwinisms include [4]:

Special creationism (sometimes just "Creationism" [5], the view that species are created
"specially" in each case): challenges 1, 2, 6 and usually
8. Examples: the last biologist to be a special creationist
was Louis Agassis (d. 1873) [6].

Orthogenesis (linear evolution, aka Great Chain
of Being thinking, the view that evolution proceeds in direct
lines to goals, also sometimes called teleological evolution
or progressionism): challenges 8 and 9. Examples: Lamarck,
Nägeli, Eimer, Osborn, Severtsov, Teilhard. Often found
as vague statements in more orthodox biology (in terms like "primitive"
and "advanced" forms instead of the usual meanings
in biology of older and derived) [7].

Process Structuralism (aka Formalism, aka Laws
of growth tradition, also called Naturphilosophie,
deriving from Goethe and Oken - the view that there are deep
laws of change that determine some or all of the features of
organisms): challenges 3 to 5 and 10. Examples: Goethe,
Geoffroy, D'Arcy Thompson [10]
, Goodwin, Salthe, Gould, Løvtrup [11]

Saltationism (in texts before about 1940 also called
"Mutationism" or "Mutation Theory",
the view that changes between forms occur all-at-once or not
at all): challenges 11, and sometimes 2. Examples: Galton,
TH Huxley, De Vries, TH Morgan, Johannsen, Goldschmidt [12]

For historical purposes, it is worth noting that all of these
except Special Creationism have been held by people who thought
themselves good Darwinians. Of course, many eugenicists also thoght
they were good Darwinians (including Darwin's cousin Francis Galton,
his son Leonard, RA Fisher and Karl Pearson [13]). However, TH Huxley and Galton were saltationists, Gould is
a (partial) process structuralist along with Richard Lewontin.
Darwin himself, and his disciple George Romanes, were also Instructionists,
and the number of orthogenetic Darwinians is hard to list (cf
Ruse 1997). However, to disagree with "Darwinism" today,
you must challenge some, preferably more than one, of these theses.

Variation of Opinion within Biology

Moreover, within biology itself there are a wide range of opinions,
some of which are sometimes called anti-Darwinian either by the
biologists themselves or by others wishing to use this difference
to "prove" that Darwinism is on the nose.

Pluralism is the view that more than natural selection is not
the sole, nor perhaps the main active process in evolution (may deny
all or part of 4, 5, 7b and 8). Sometimes this view is allied to the
views called collectively Hierarchicalism and also to Process
Structuralism (eg, Gould and Eldredge and their collaborators), which
rejects the view known as Genic Reductionism (as presented by
Dawkins, GC Williams and Maynard Smith) - which claims that the
"units of selection" are genes. Hierachical views of
evolution tend to deny that selection acts on genes (or just on genes,
depending). Gould [14] has also argued for a
high degree of contingency in evolution, but this is not, nor has it
even been, un-Darwinian - even the strictest selectionists have
allowed for contingency. Opposing Pluralism is Monism, the view
that all evolutionary (and indeed biological) phenomena can be brought
under a single set of consistent theories or mechanisms.

It is sometimes held that Genic Reductionism is identical to
another position known as Neo-Darwinism, or to another
called Synthetic Darwinism. This is wrong. Neo-Darwinism
was a school of thought from the 1880s to the 1930s which made
natural selection the main and perhaps sole cause of all evolution.
It was started by AR Wallace and Weismann, and it tended to deny
the efficacy of drift (9, although this was not directly stated
until the 1930s by Sewall Wright) and sexual selection (5). It
was not accepted by all, or even most, Darwinians and never caught
on outside Britain and to a lesser extent Germany.

Synthetic Darwinism was christened by Julian Huxley [15] in 1942 as the marriage (sometimes
uneasy) between Mendelian genetics and Fisher's reworking in mathematical
terms of the theory of natural selection (1 through 6, 7b, 8 and
9). At the same time the views of Sewall Wright that much change
is due to non-selective change (9) were incorporated into the
synthesis.

Genic Reductionism is actually the result of taking the Synthesis
and using the recently developed techniques of Game Theory [16] to model changes in populations.
To do this, one needs a carrier of fitness to make the math work,
and the gene seemed to be the obvious entity. The debate spilled
over into the 1970s and 1980s as the Units of Selection
debate[17]. The issue focused
around whether selection could act only on genes in individuals
or whether it could also select groups right up to and including
species themselves [18].

Genic Reductionism is also called, variously, Ultra-Darwinism [19], "hard Darwinism",
"selectionism", and "panadaptationism" or
even just "adaptationism", although selectionism and
adaptationism are common to all varieties of Darwinism (and some
nonevolutionary views as well), and Darwin and his immediate followers
had no knowledge to speak of about genes.

Recently, the issue of self-organisation of biological systems has
been held to be anti-selection (Kauffman[20], denying 4), although the first proponents
of self-organisation (Eigen & Schuster) thought it was then
subjected to selective bias. Kauffman has since been convinced that
his views are consistent with modern Darwinism by Maynard Smith.

Modern proponents of these, shall we say, heterodox if not
heretical, views include:

Which of these will find their way permanently into the orthodox
camp remains to be seen. Some who think of themselves as anti-Darwinians
complain that Darwinism is a shifting target. It certainly has
incorporated such challenges as Mendelism, mutation, random drift
and neutral evolution. This is, however, a feature of scientific
traditions, if not of axiomatic formal philosophies.

Rates of Change and Phylogenetic Histories

Let us now consider the Punctuated Equilibrium debate. This
is supposed to be anti-Darwinian because it challenges Darwin's
"gradualism", which he is supposed to have inherited
from Charles Lyell, the geologist (11). However, Darwin himself
stated that evolution would proceed at different rates, and two
founders of the Synthesis - Mayr and Simpson - both developed
theories of relatively rapid change and speciation events.
When Gould and Eldredge first proposed their Punctuated Equilibrium
Theory they held it to be well within orthodox Darwinism, and
after some varying emphases over the next 20 years, it is so held
to be orthodox again. The sort of Uniformitarianism that
Darwin did inherit from Lyell worked on the assumption that the
causes in operation in the modern period are not qualitatively
different from those of earlier times. However, they may differ
quantitatively in rate and strength, and if the evidence is that
they have, this is not a disproof of Darwinism as expressed
from 1859 to the current day.

A different but related problem is that which I mentioned above when I
named Colin Patterson's talk at the American Museum of Natural
History, in New York, to a group of systematists (professionals who
classify species and relate them to each other). The assumption in J
Huxley's work in 1942 was that evolution is the basis for a natural
classification scheme - species most recently separated are more
closely related. A group known as the "Pattern Cladists"
held that it is logically impossible to identify ancestors, and so
this natural classification cannot be achieved (they were and are in
favour of a different logical basis). Patterson entitled his talk
"Evolution and Creationism" at the suggestion of fellow
pattern cladist Gareth Nelson (meaning that natural classification
neither said anything about nor depended upon evolutionary history),
which has been taken from the sphere of classification and extended to
the domain of biology in general [27]. Now,
pattern cladists are evolutionists, and deny none of the 11 Darwinian
theses, except in the context of generating phylogenetic
histories. There, they call the evolutionary systematists
"Darwinians" and deny they are in that camp.

Conclusion

To be an anti-Darwinian is at once easy and very hard. It is
easy if you deny the core tenet of evolution (1) or if you assert
that some of the other 10 theses are core Darwinian views and
then deny them (but that doesn't make them so - as Lincoln said,
calling a tail a leg doesn't mean dogs have five legs). But it
is very hard to find any other feature than (1) that is truly
inflexible in Darwinism, and so long as the general outline of
Darwinism is retained, the emphases can be shifted. The denial
of any one of the other 10 theses is not denial of all of them,
and rejection of the exclusivity of one of them is not rejection
of its validity altogether. To be anti-Darwinian requires hard
empirical work to disestablish several of these theses, and to
show Darwinian modes of thought to be unnecessary or misleading.

Bibliography

Bowler PJ (1989) Evolution: The history of an idea,
University of California Press:Berkeley, Calif. (Revised edition)

Kauffman SA (1985) Self-organization, selective adaptation,
and its limits: A new pattern of inference in evolution and development.
In: Evolution at a Crossroads: The new biology and the new
philosophy of science, eds DJ Depew and BH Weber, MIT Press:
Cambridge Mass. 169-207.

Kauffman SA (1993) The Origins of Order: Self-Organization
and Selection in Evolution, Oxford University Press: Oxford

Kauffman SA (1995) At Home in the Universe: The search
for laws of complexity, Penguin: Harmondsworth

Wallace AR (1890) Darwinism: An exposition of the theory
of natural selection with some of its applications, Macmillan:
London, 2nd edition

Wilson DS (1992) Group Selection. In: Keller and Lloyd 1992.

Notes

[1]
Patterson 1979 Evolution

[2]
Hull 1988, Bowler 1989

[3]
Wallace 1890

[4]
Mayr 1982, Bowler 1989

[5]
Creation is, of course, a core doctrine of many religions, most
of whose theologians and theoreticians have no quarrel with Darwinism.
Consequently, it is a mistake to think of the doctrine of creation
in itself being opposed to the idea of evolution. To distinguish
this sense of creationism, and also ordinary uses of the
terms formalism and mutationism, from the anti-Darwinian
senses, I shall capitalise them.